Blog Comments & Posts

Here's the deal: I build links. I build a lot of them - tens of thousands every month.
How do I do this? I create fun online quizzes and then provide HTML code with quiz scores that bloggers and website owners can embed on their own sites. A good example is this widget, which tells you if you talk too much in your blog, or ...

As Rand mentioned in his recent post: Big Changes at SEOmoz, I'm leaving the company to pursue other opportunities. It's been nearly 4 and a half years, which is a millennium in tech-industry time, and I feel that SEOmoz is at a point where I'm comfortable leaving. Previously, I was the only developer, designer, and systems administrator and our entire infrastructure depended on me. With Jeff, and more recently Mel, I can now leave knowing that SEOmoz is in good hands.

Following up last weeks whiteboard friday about geotargeting, we're proud to announce the GeoTargeting Detection Tool. This tool will help you determine how well your site is targeted to country specific search engines. It examines several factors that the search engines use to determi...

We're rolling out two new features today for our SEOmoz members: the first is a collection of Free SEO Tools for all to use (you just have to have a free seomoz account), the second new feature is an SEO Dashboard for our premium members.
Rather than using a ..how do you say.. "keyboard," to tell you about these features, I recorded a screencast so that I could...

I've just put the finishing touches on a new tool that's exclusive to our premium members. (Not a premium member? Read through to the bottom of this post - goodies are on the way).
Backlink Anchor Text Analysis Tool
...

I've just put the finishing touches on a new tool that I think is a killer addition to our current arsenal of SEO tools. It's basically a tricked-out version of the "Where's it Rank?" PHP script that I of...

We're launching a new section for our premium members this morning: SEOmoz Q&A. This is a place where premium members can ask the SEOmoz staff SEO related questions and receive tips, advice, or just get pointed in the right direction. It works a bit like a trouble ticket system: discussions are opened, closed, rated, and eventual...

Patrick Sexton (aka feedthebot) over at SEOish contacted a few big names in the search marketing industry and asked: "What would you do if you only had 100 dollars to market your website?" This excellent read includes responses from Aaron Wall, Andy Beal, Andy Hagans, Kid Disco, Lee Odden, Tod...

I've added a feature to the Page Strength tool that allows you to do a hard refresh of the data in your report. If you run a report and data is missing try refreshing it and it'll look for factors that were missing and attempt to fetch them again. Please keep the following in mind:
Refreshing will only re-fetch data that is missing, n...

Myspace launched a social news site last week that allows users to vote on stories and democratically determine popularity, much like Digg. I've spent some time getting a feel for how it works and my opinion is that the site, much like everything Myspace produces, is medicore at best. The interface is clunky and has a simple voting system that isn...

As promised the Crawl Test Tool has been released to the public. I wrote a blog entry about this about a month ago which highlighted some of the features of the tool, but in a nutshell this is what it does:
This tool helps quickly diagnose search engine crawling issues on your website...

Our latest tool analyzes the content of a given page and extracts the terms and phrases that appear to be targeted at search engines. It applies certain weights to HTML elements and other on-page factors to determine what it think...

I received an email this morning informing me that my Oatmeal account is the 57th most powerful member on digg. Apparently someone at HarryMaugans.com has done some independent research and created a list of the To...

We've added a new feature for premium members: SEO Tips and Tricks. It's nothing earth-shatteringly huge, just a simple list of SEO tips, tricks, and bits of industry knowledge that we don't make publicly available. The list will be updated fairly regularly and when a new tip is published you'll notice a New SEO Tip link in the left-hand navig...

I needed a tool that quickly tells me what page of search results a URL ranks on for a specific keyword. It didn't need any advanced features or complicated options, just something where if I was visiting a page I could hit a button and instantly find out where it ranks for a keyword. I threw together a quick PHP script that does exactly this, including a browser button so I can ...

I don't normally cross-post blog entries, but I figured this one was appropriate for the SEOmoz crowd. About two weeks ago I made a couple funny sketches of what social media websites would look like if they were all sitting around together.
Social Media Websites in Illustrated Form.
...

The launch of SEOmoz v3 about a month ago was also the debut of a new tool: the Crawl Test. The Crawl Test Tool is used to quickly diagnose potential crawling issues and give you an overview of your site's search friendliness. You enter a URL and the tool spiders that URL as well as the first 50 internal links it finds on that page.

There's been a ton of buzz about Freebase lately: a newly launched collaborative database of cross-linked data. I'm not going to jump on the bandwagon and get all crazy excited about it, because to me it looks like another geek-centric technology that is exciting to the techies but useless to 99.9% of the population (...

Footers are important. Usually, they are a repetition of the primary navigation and contain anything that is considered "the fine print," such as copyright information and privacy policies. With the rising popularity of standards based design, they also have become the home for buttons that show off standards compliance. While doing a ...

Dearest Digg,
I couldn't help but notice your site has a small technical issue. It's no biggie, but I think fixing it could save you some money. I'm all about saving people money, just the other day I handed out coupons for a free trial-sized bag of hydrogenized bean-lard-mulch. I know, I'm practically a saint.
I noticed ...

It appears that the overture bid tool is finally gone (for real this time). The information from this tool is used in our own Keyword Difficulty Tool, so now I'm looking for an alternate source of similar data. Previously the overture bids accounted for around 12% of your keywor...

Web design can be incredibly frustrating. You'd think that with all the infinite possibilities of what-goes-where it'd be pretty easy to land a design that works, yet somehow we've all been there: stuck working on a design that refuses to look right. These 8 tactics are what I use to get out of that sticky spot.

Seeing as how I don't have enough to do today, I thought I'd run a database query that wiped out the login information for all our users.
Luckily I had a backup but it was from before we launched the new site, so if you registered before then (Feb. 2nd, 2007) your account is fine.
If you were a premium member or purchased an article, I had this information backed up ...

This is a podcast highlighting all the new stuff we've added to SEOmoz with the launch of our new site. I tried to cover all the new features we added, including explaining MozPoints and the details of our premium membership. SEOmoz Version 3 - New Bells and Whistles ...

The new site is up! I'm swamped right now but I plan on writing a full length blog entry about all the bells and whistles that are available sometime this weekend. I'm also going to try and do a screencast so I can visually walk everyone through the site and show all the cool stuff we've got. A few of the pages are running a bit slow due to...

SEOBlackHat recently wrote a post about global warming that calls it out as being "The greatest scientific fraud in the history of mankind." Even though the author says otherwise, the post is obviously linkbait for an SEO competition to ran...

Just a quick heads up: SEOmoz is moving to a new host today. I'm going to try my best to minimize breaking stuff, but shoot me an email if anything appears busted. Hopefully the ride won't be too bumpy. I'm going to make the DNS change very soon and try my best to make it a seamless transition.Regarding the new version of the SEOmoz site, things are very close to being finished. (I kno...

Hopefully I'm not contributing to the noise on SEOmoz by writing this post, but I think a quick entry on the subject is warranted. Very few people capitalize SEOmoz properly - and by capitalize I mean in terms of grammar (not money). We're the ones to blame, our name isn't exactly something anyone would know how to capitalize c...

I'm posting on behalf of Rand who is currently busy at SES Chicago. Prior to today if you wanted a link from SEOmoz all you had to do was sign up for an account, edit the URL field in your profile, and add a blog comment. We left this in place simply because we didn't care if the strength of our outbound links was diluted. Although SEO was high on our list of consider...

Following up yesterday's article, How to Convince a Client their Site Doesn't Need Music, I decided to write a similar one about splash pages. Splash pages are the pages that the user sees before they actually get to a website; typically, they're flash and offer some kind of introductory animation. The user clicks "Skip Intro&qu...

I've lost count of how many clients have requested that music be playing in the background of their website. As a professional web developer with a few too many years of implementing ridiculous requests, I've acquired quite a knack for convincing a client that music is a bad idea. The...

Everyone's favorite social bookmarking site: Del.icio.us, appears to be rendering different content to the search engines than to its users. Every page on del.icio.us appears to have a the following directive in place: <meta name="robots" content="noarchive,nofollow,noindex"/>This should t...

Page Strength reports have been taking a bit longer than usual lately, sometimes going well over a minute per report. This is primarily due to our proxy servers being very taxed - having run over 100,000 page strength reports ta...

When Jeff mentioned the page strength tool helper monkey he pretty much gave out the recipe for our secret sauce. Rather than trying to cover up this incident, I put together a diagram showing exactly how page strength scores are calculated.&nb...

I'd like to preface this entry by saying SEOmoz does not practice or endorse blackhat SEO techniques. This is not intended to be an instructional blackhat SEO article or a list of websites you should all go take advantage of. The goal of this post is, rather, to "out" a significant weakness that can be exploited by savvy users.
While reading EGOL's ...

While attending an SES session last week I decided to put together some linkbait. The session itself wasn't particularly interesting and inspiration had struck so I figured I'd make better use of my time and write some kind of guide or howto article. The result was the 5 HTML elements you probably never use blog entry. My original plan ...

This is a list of HTML elements I've found to be very poorly represented in most markup on the web today. Many of these elements offer more semantic value than actual functionality, but with the rising popularity of CSS driven design where HTML elements are used for what they were actually intended for, I felt shining a little light on them was appropriate.
...

Just a quick update folks - I've created a media="print" CSS file that creates printer friendly versions of all SEOmoz's pages. You should now be able to print out the stuff on our site without any major graphical issues. Printed pages won't look perfect (there's a lot of spacing issues), but it's still a huge improvement. I removed the header, footer, logo, and secondary navigation. I a...

Following suit of Matt Mcgee's Small Business SEM (as well as a million other blogs), we're switching our blog subscription format to FeedBurner. This will make the blog more accessible to the wide variety of readers out there and not limit it to just RSS. It'll also allow us to have clic...

As a professional web designer I've noticed a consistent trend in the majority of the projects I've worked on: The more time that is spent dissecting, analyzing, and critiquing a design by the wrong kinds of people the worse that design gets. The same trend applies to the number of people involved in the design process.Group intelligence is multiplicative when id...

It's been a week since we launched the Page Strength SEO tool and I'd like to give an update on how things went and what lies ahead. First off, I'd like to apologize for the downtime on thursday morning. The tool launched last monday and received a fair amount of traffic that lasted through wednesday. Thursda...

Last.fm's signup page is one of the best I've ever seen. It's elegant, user-friendly, and does a fantastic job of keeping the user aware of what's going on. Rather than splitting the signup process into several steps across multiple pages or combining them all into one massive form, it splits it into three steps but keeps everything on one...

This past weekend a bunch of us SEOmozzers participated in a 5k (3 mile) benefit run around greenlake. I'd just like to publicly say GOOD JOB to everyone that put the effort in and ran the distance. Although not highly competitive, it was for a good cause and I think we all queued up some rad karma points. Also, kudos to Kat for initiating the idea.
Here's a few photos:...

SEOmoz has recently been interviewing applicants for a web developer position. Prior to conducting the interview, I wrote up a list of technical questions I wanted to ask. After interviewing, I decided to build upon this list and put together a larger one that everyone could use - both for interviewers and interviewees....

Using image replacements in a CSS driven site is becoming a very common practice. SEOmoz uses it all over the place - if you view the source of our homepage you'll see: <div id="what_is_seomoz"> <h1><span>What is SEOmoz?</span></h1>
<p> SEOmoz i...

If you're thinking about putting together a pure CSS driven site and need inspiration, I've compiled a short list of my favorite CSS showcases. I use these sites not only to inspire visual ideas, but also to learn more creative and practical ways to use CSS. I often find myself digging through source code of sites in the showcases discovering good (and bad) CSS ...

As promised, here's a quick run-down of the new features on SEOmoz.
Search - This will search the entire site. It needs some fine tuning, but it's effective for the time being.
Threaded blog comments - You can now reply to individual comments rather than just the blog entry itself. Th...

The SEOmoz re-design is complete! I just wrote a nice long blog entry on the subject, hit "submit" and at that moment our internet access went down at the office. So here's a quick recap of that blog post:
Watch out for bugs
User photos are screwy right now - I'm working on fixing them
Logins now ask for your email ...

I need recommendations for a site search engine that does the following:
Spiders your site's content to X levels deep
Build a database of page titles, urls, and content
Provide a searchable front-end that is easily customizable to match an existing site
I could write my own. It'd just be a simple spider program that spid...

The saga of redirecting all requests to http://www.seomoz.org/index.php to point to http://www.seomoz.org/ has finally come to an end. We now practice what we preach. For those who are not familiar, it's important to have all duplicate content point to a single, "canonical" edition of the content. Requests to index.php and requests to www.seomoz.org/ have the same content even though they have ...

The re-design of SEOmoz has proven itself to be a very difficult and time consuming task, as you can see I'm still working on the header. Rand suggested I write a blog entry so you can all see how things are coming along and share in my turmoil. :)
Some of the designs turned out okay, others are just plain horrible. I've found my best work comes by accident, so I often just ...

In the midst of re-designing SEOmoz I decided I really needed a change of pace. I've only lightly used AJAX, so I decided to build an AJAX powered tool that looks up the geographic location of an IP address. It seemed simple enough to build and I figured it'd ...

Internet Relay Chat (aka IRC) is an older form of communication on the internet. It's an online discussion system where you join "channels," which are basically chat rooms. I frequent several technical channels but recently have been spending some time in one centered around SEO. The topics of discus...

I have no reputation within the digg community. In fact, if they catch wind that they're about to be subject to a round of mingle2 or matt inman linkbait, they bury me. I go out of my way to make my content look benign, and I certainly don't spend all day building up my digg account.

I think if you got on digg and saw the benefits of having your site in front of that many people, you'd think a little differently.

What I've been doing is hosting the linkbait on a separate domain, with no mention of mingle2 or dating, and then once it goes popular I add "created by Mingle2" and add some signup links to our site. I usually wait until a few hours after it's been promoted before I feel it's safe to make this change.

If I'm not worried about reddit or digg, I'll just host it directly on Mingle2. The StumbleUpon community, (which is totally awesome, in my opinion) wil pretty much accept anything provided the content is enjoyable.

Most people find out about big announcements and updates to SEOmoz through the blog, so maybe just use twitter to publish funny, random stuff about what's happening at SEOmoz? Twitter seems more condusive to that kind of thing anyway.

One thing I don't quite get: why did you change the name? The page strength tool has been running for years, building an identity for itself that people are familiar with.

"Trifecta" means very little to most people, while "page strength" denotes exactly what the trifecta tool is all about: "Test the Strength of Your Page, Blog or Domain." Dropping the name because it uses "page" instead of blog or domain is just semantics.

I would have just called it PageStrength 3, because it's the third version of the software as well as because it now supports 3 different types of reporting.

Ha! Ya know - I didn't think anything of it at the time, but when I was talking to my mom she told me just how much she loved Oatmeal and went on and on about how beautiful the stars were last night. Of course, it was hard to understand what she was talking about because she didn't have her teeth in.

I want to clarify a bit the events that led to me getting penalized by google and publicizing my linkbaiting tactics. I never really defended myself over the post on shoemoney's blog, mostly because I think Brent makes some excellent points about when to be transparent and when to STFU, but also because I just don't care that much :)

I did one interview in late august with Joe Whyte about my zombie quiz and some of the other quizzes I was using to market Mingle2. I'd never really done an interview before and I didn't disclose the particulars of how the quizzes were successful. The interview didn't get much press and for months afterward my quizzes got me ranked, I made a ton of cash, and all was well.

Later that year a blogger from wired magazine took one of my quizzes and embedded a badge in the wired blog that contained a link to one of my payday loan websites. A reporter from the guardian (guardian.co.uk) saw this and did some investigative reporting to figure out who was behind it. After he figured out it was me, he emailed google asking if this tactic was legit or not. Google penalized our site immediately and a week later the guardian article was published.

I barely attend conferences anymore, let alone speak at them. I don't run an SEO blog and publicize about my tactics. I don't have a photo of my brand new audi with me holding a sign saying "thanks payday loan keywords!" sitting in my blog's sidebar. I only wrote the "widgetbait gone wild" post because I felt a public mea culpa was the only way to get our rankings back. In other words: saying that I need to STFU seemed a little excessive, especially the part of the shoemoney article saying I costed companies millions of dollars because of my effects on widgets and SEO. If those companies had that much invested in "how many five year olds could you take in a fight," then they've got much bigger problems than me being too verbose :) Like I said, I completely agree with Brent that there's a need for STFUing for some SEOs out there, I just don't think I was the best example.

I say don't decapitate your golden goose so you can wear it like a lovely hat for everyone to admire. Keep the golden goose hidden and safe; feed him biscuits and gently stroke him. That's what golden geese are for.

I think there's a variety of reasons why the web 2.0 awards didn't make digg this year (one of them being that diggers don't gush over web 2.0 as much as they used to), but I think it's notable that the awards made the frontpage every year for the past two years:

Both of these submissions contained little or no mention of SEOmoz, Rand, Jane, or SEO.

Not that digg really matters for the awards, anyway, the real links come from the winners themselves. It's also worth noting that according to the rank checker the seomoz website jumped 67 positions for the keyword "web 2.0" since yesterday, now being listed on page 2 at google.

I agree wholeheartedly with all your reasons for not switching domains, and I particularly agree with you that diversifying our marketing methods is crucial - especially when your business depends on organic SEO.

There was a lot of contention between us on the issue of switching domains. We all agreed that there were some major cons to the idea, but ultimately we decided to switch because of two reasons:

1. Organic SEO is one of our biggest strengths. We're not useless without it, but taking that out of the equation is like askng me to run a marathon with a sprained ankle.

2. The JustSayHi website badly needed a redesign and re-brand, anyway, and switching to OnePlusYou would give us that opportunity. We could have always re-designed JustSayHi, but I think the OnePlusYou name is more memorable, clever, and appropriate for our site. JustSayHi has a strong following right now, but I want to create users that are fanatic - and I think the OnePlusYou idea can help us achieve that.

Of course, this all could be completely moot if Google decides to unban JustSayHi - but the jury is still out on that one.

Hey everyone - one last little thing: I'm leaving on an overseas trip tomorrow morning so I won't be very responsive on email until I get settled. If anyone emails me or comments here and I don't get back to you right away, that's why.

Jeff - just a quick bug I found: I have the words <noscript> in the comment above and when I click "edit comment" it only renders the comment box up until the noscript tag occurs and then it gets cut off.

Clearly the programmer who wrote the comment system is dumber than a sack of hammers.

You all have no idea how refreshing is to hear this discussion out in the open. For the past few months my co-workers and I have been reeling, debating, and stressing from the google penalty. A lot of what everyone is saying here is mimicking the internal conversations we've been having, and I really appreciate everyone chipping in.

@Matt Cutts: regarding Jeremy's post about zombie quizzes that are promoting Ultrasound technician schools, I agree that those links aren't particularly helpful and trying to defend that would be quite a stretch. But suppose the zombie quiz was promoting dating related keywords and was hosted on our dating website - it's off-topic but it comes back to that same question of knowing where the line is drawn.

In regards to invisible hit counters, the key difference there is that their links are hidden in <noscript> tags, while ours are out in the open. We also make an obvious note to the user that the badge HTML contains a keyword-rich link. Which brings me to my next point..

A somewhat bitchin idea: What if by default we remove the keyword-rich link from the badge HTML, but we have a checkbox next to it that says "Include a link to OnePlusyou - free online dating," with a brief explanation about how we're a small company who uses quizzes to get the word out about our site, and if you want to help us out you can opt to have extra HTML included in the badge that promotes our dating portal. If the user opts in then then it's editorially chosen, right?

The thing that really bothers me about moving to a new site isn't so much that we have to change our brand and possibly tarnish our reputation (although that sucks, too), but that we're losing all that domain authority that we'd built over the past year with white-hat link building. Half a million links are basically going down the drain.

Thanks David. I agree that the biggest mistake was going after those spammy payday loan keywords. it was my first and last foray into eating spam-sandwiches.

Truthfully, I didn't blog very much about my tactics, I tried to keep it on the DL (for the most part). Most of the negative press stemmed from a blogger at the Guardian who got upset when a payday loan link was embedded in the widget code HTML.

You could check their browser type and if it's the latest version of firefox automatically delete their cookies for them. Set a cookie after that called "auto_deleted" to indicate that you already deleted their cookies, that way you don't keep deleting them and preventing them from logging in.

It'll log out a bunch of users but it's better than a blank white screen.

I disabled the text messages right off the bat. The sheer volume of texts I would get is not worth it. Right now if my phone goes off from a text message it means something to me because it's usually an actual person. If I enabled that feature in twitter it would turn getting a text message into something as routine as getting an automated email.

I didn't try to convince myself that I'd signed up in order to keep ahead of the world's breaking news, to connect with important people or follow the torrid happenings at SXSW.

I was in that keynote when it all went down, and dear lord it was hilarious. If it weren't for the postsecret guy giving such an incredible presentation, I'd say the zuckerberg debacle was my favorite session during sxsw.

Oh yeah, and I still don't "get" twitter. I understand how it works, I understand how to use it, it just hasn't caught on with me yet. I met quite a few people who feel the same way.

So moral of the story is, guy finds himself being a superstar programmer. Doesn't get any dates. Hmm. Guy starts to learn social skills. Pwns digg. Doesn't get any dates. Decides he's sick of this no dates m'larky so sets up his own dating website. Doesn't get any dates. Pwns Digg again, but like real hard this time. Plus pwns the blogosphere. Doesn't get any dates. Sells dating site for lots of $$$$. Now a rich, marketing genius, entrepenuer and still a coding rockstar. Doesn't get any dates. Decides to give up day job and focus full time working on getting dates.

hahaha, I seriously want to put that paragraph in the "about Mingle2" section of the website

I actually met him at SES san jose this year and picked his brain about a few online dating related things. Well..I kind of grilled him, actually. His responses were pretty filtered, but it was still insightful.

I hope this tool will stop bloggers from splattering every possible social media bookmark icon at the bottom of every entry and adding a "digg this" button to all their content, even if it's just pictures of their cat or something.

It only needs to be local to the country level. Most websites aren't hosted in the same city (or even state) as their actual business, so it wouldn't make sense for the engines to use that as a factor.

The tool is not effective for long-term anchor text analysis. Obviously I can't build something that's going to analyze the anchor text of 1 million pages, we just don't have the bandwidth (both literally and figuratively).

The tool is effective, however, for a more temporal look at your backlinks. The links it uses are primarily drived from the technorati API and are sorted by freshness.

I didn't know google had officially released an article recommending sIFR, that's very cool. At the time the use of image replacments wasn't as widely accepted, particularly by the search engines. It's good to see the the SEs are getting with the times.

The page strength tool is also currently suffering from a bit of over-engineering. I've abstracted the logic behind some of the fetch mechanisms to the point that it's often very difficult to identify where things are going wrong. In the next version I'm going to keep things a lot simpler and possibly switch development languages (no more perl)

Mike - restricting basic members to partial use also coincided with the "refresh report" feature being added, so it's hard to say what effect it had. It didn't appear to help a whole lot, but I know that even after we throttled the free users the volume of reports didn't go down very dramatically.

I was considering cutting off free users from using the PS tool entirely, and if the quality of reports goes up enough just keeping it that way.